Computer Associates International, Inc. Business Information, Profile, and History

computers software digital systems

One Computer Associates PlazaIslandia, New York 11788-7000U.S.A.

History of Computer Associates International, Inc.

Computer Associates International is the second-largest computer software vendor after Microsoft Inc. The company concentrates on operating systems software for computers, particularly mainframes, as well as business applications software for both mainframes and personal computers.

Computer Associates was founded in 1976 by Charles Wang. Born in Shanghai, Wang moved with his family to the United States in 1952, and studied math and physics at Queens College. After his graduation in 1967, Wang went into computer programming. Large, expensive mainframes were the most important computer at that time, and the software industry barely existed. IBM, which sold most mainframes, included basic software in the price, and all customized programming was done in house. In 1969 the United States government began requiring that software be sold separately, allowing individual entrepreneurs to offer competition.

At that time Wang worked for a small computer service bureau in New York City that marketed software for the Swiss company Computer Associates (CA). When CA decided to establish its own business in the United States, Wang offered assistance, and in 1976 began Computer Associates International as a joint venture with the Swiss company. With only a single partner and a small Manhattan office, Wang limited himself to marketing software by telephone. After an initial failure, he succeeded with CA-SORT, a program enabling computers to sort through data quickly and economically. Wang's SORT offered competition to a similar IBM program, and Wang convinced many businesses with IBM hardware to change over to CA's product. Mainframe software is licensed rather than sold, and the recurring revenue from the licenses of the SORT software was a great boost to Computer Associates.

Computer Associates began expanding, hiring salespeople and programmers, and in 1978 Wang's brother Tony, a lawyer, joined the firm. Sales of SORT generated enough money for Wang to buy new programs from smaller firms and market them to customers who already owned SORT. Wang's success allowed him to buy out the original Swiss company in 1980.

Computer Associates grew rapidly through acquisitions, buying in 1982 for $22 million in a stock swap. Capex, which was half of CA's size, sold support software for programmers. In 1983 Wang purchased Stewart P. Orr Associates for $2 million and Information Unlimited Software for $10 million. He continued two years later, acquiring Sorcim for $27 million, Johnson Systems for $16 million, and Arkay Computer for an undisclosed amount. With these purchases, Computer Associates became the top independent vendor of system utilities, with a continuing specialization in data compression. In 1985 CA paid CGA Computer $25 million for Top Secret, a computer-security program. Although critics maintained that Wang had paid too much for the program, which had sales of $10 million a year, Wang saw great potential in the product, and sold $36 million worth of Top Secret in the first year after the acquisition. His purchases also brought some software for personal computers, which was the fastest-growing segment of the computer market.

CA's main focus at this time was on products designed to improve the performance of IBM equipment. Each time IBM upgraded its computers, it kept portions of old designs so customers could continue to run their older programs; as a result, IBM mainframes were powerful but inefficient. This market presented a particular opportunity for CA because IBM did not make an effort to market products that pointed out defects in its computers; therefore Computer Associates did not have to compete against IBM's larger resources.

The firm also continued to attempt to break into applications software, which was earning firms like the Microsoft Corp. and Lotus Development Co. huge sums of money in the personal computer market. It made an important move into applications in 1986 with the $67 million purchase of Integrated System Software Corp., which specialized in graphics software. It also purchased Software International, a maker of financial applications, for $24 million. Despite this new applications strength, system utilities still accounted for 70 percent of Computer Associates' revenues in 1986.

In 1987 Computer Associates made its largest purchase yet, acquiring rival Uccel for about $830 million in stock. Uccel had been a competitor in the market for systems utilities software, so the purchase strengthened Computer Associates' already-strong systems utilities sector, adding 7,500 customers to CA's base of 26,000 while eliminating a rival company. The purchase temporarily made CA the largest independent software company, ahead of Microsoft, whose strengths lay in software for personal computers. CA also had far more products, marketing about 200 kinds of software to Microsoft's 26 and Lotus's 15.

Uccel software filled in several gaps in CA's systems utility product line, but excessive product overlap required a growth strategy involving relentless cost-cutting to maximize profits. CA dismissed 25 percent of Uccel's staff of 1,200 within five days of receiving approval for the deal from the Justice Department. Although some analysts have criticized CA throughout its history for focusing on acquisitions at the expense of developing its own programs, Wang's continued pursuit of market share through acquisitions increased his firm's sales from $450 million in 1986 to $628.8 million in 1987. Most of the 13 percent of sales it spent on research and development went to improving its newly acquired software.

By 1988 Computer Associates employed 4,500 people in 22 countries and reported $842.1 million in sales. To service its 30,000 customers, which included most Fortune 500 companies, CA had a worldwide sales force of 1,200, with an additional 1,400 in sales support. This high salesperson-to-customer ratio allowed salespeople to concentrate on a few clients; nevertheless, the company received poor ratings for customer satisfaction. Customers brought in by the acquisitions complained of difficulty in finding the right person at CA to answer questions and of CA representatives who appeared to be more interested in making sales than providing support.

CA's acquisitions had brought it financial strength and a broad range of software. Its SuperCalc spreadsheet application, bought in 1984, brought the company into competition with Lotus and its 1-2-3 spreadsheet, which had become the best-selling software in the personal computer market. Easywriter, a word-processing program bought in 1983, also brought CA strength in the personal computer market. Due to rapid technical advances that made them increasingly powerful, sales of smaller computers grew more quickly than those of mainframes, an aid to Computer Associates. The firm's utilities helped customers squeeze more efficiency from their existing mainframes, and system software like utilities still accounted for about 75 percent of company revenue. Hoping to lessen its dependency on systems software, CA announced that it would expand applications software to about one-third of its business.

Computer Associates acquired another maker of database management software in late 1988, buying Applied Data Research, Inc. for $170 million from Ameritech. CA temporarily ceased its acquisitions in 1989 following the purchase of Cullinet Software Inc. for $289 million. Cullinet sold database management systems, and CA hoped to use the firm's products to help its applications run on IBM, Digital Equipment, and Unix systems. But some of Cullinet's software competed with software Computer Associates already offered, forcing some customers to delay purchasing decisions until CA made it clear which software it would be continuing to offer.

Soon after the purchase, CA terminated about 900 Cullinet positions. The absorption of Cullinet, along with need for internal streamlining (the assignments of CA's 600 U.S. salespeople had begun to overlap, with up to four representatives servicing one account), necessitated a corporate reorganization. Simultaneously, mainframe and minicomputer sales slacked off, hurting the market for programs. With the acquisition of Uccel and Cullinet, Computer Associates became the first software firm to top $1 billion in sales, in 1989. As a result of its mounting problems, however, CA's growth dropped from 45 percent in 1989 to six percent in 1990, and its stock price dropped 50 percent.

Computer Associates was again sharply criticized for a lack of focus after the Cullinet deal. CA responded by unveiling Computing Architecture 1990s in April 1990, a software strategy intended to bring some order to the group of software products it had acquired during the past decade. The plan had three major components: database management, systems management, and applications. The firm vowed to make all of its programs work together and 'talk' to each other across different types of computer hardware and operating systems. This type of networking was increasingly important in the computer industry, with networks of smaller computers displacing mainframes. The Computing Architecture 1990s system, which used software intermediaries to connect different types of computer systems, applying them like telephone switches, was made possible in part by CA Datacom/DB, a widely installed database management system the firm acquired with Applied Data Research in 1988. To help the plan along, Computer Associates spent $190 million on research and development in 1990.

In combination with the Computing Architecture 1990s plan, Wang spent 1990 refocusing his 7,000 employees on product development and customer service. Programmers worked overtime to update older programs and boost customer confidence. Supercalc 5, released in 1990, included graphics and database management, making it competitive with Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft Excel. CA-Cricket Presents was a desktop presentation package that sold for half the price of competitors like Aldus Persuasion and Microsoft PowerPoint. CA-Textor, released in 1992, was an entry-level word processor designed to work with Microsoft's Windows graphic interface. Despite numerous programs for personal computers, Computer Associates suffered from anonymity in the personal computer market, with Supercalc attaining only about a 5 percent share of the spreadsheet market.

Computer Associates pushed aggressively into foreign markets, notably Canada and Japan, and overseas sales accounted for 40 to 45 percent of annual revenues. CA became more flexible in pricing its annual maintenance fees for updating and troubleshooting software. These fees comprised 33 percent of revenues, up from 20 percent four years earlier. Despite this increased flexibility, the firm's pricing policies were controversial, angering some because of the tough stand on prices taken when a client changed the way it used CA software.

Continuing its push to work with different computer platforms, CA agreed in 1991 to make many of its products work with Hewlett-Packard's Unix-based computers and reached a licensing agreement with Apple Computer to allow its databases to be accessed through Apple's Macintosh computers. It also bought a number of software vendors including Access Technology, whose software worked on Vax systems made by Digital Equipment. Computer Associates acquired On-Line Software International Inc. for about $120 million and Pansophic Systems Inc. for about $290 million, both mainframe software manufacturers. Sales for 1991 came to $1.35 billion.

Computer Associates' ambitious restructuring was hindered in a legal dispute with rival Electronic Data Systems Corporation (EDS) beginning in 1991. EDS accused Computer Associates of unfair business practices including monopoly and licensing fraud, breach of contract, and misuse of copyright. In early 1992, CA countersued, accusing EDS of pirating its software and wide-scale fraud. Customers of both firms worried that the dispute would distract attention from service.

On a positive note, CA won praise for its June 1992 purchase of the Nantucket Corporation, a leading developer of software used to build business software for MS-DOS-based computers. The acquisition is expected to help Computer Associates develop software for personal computers, an area in which CA hopes to expand. Carroll, Paul B., 'Computer Associates to Unveil Strategy to Bring Order to Its Software Products,' Wall Street Journal, April 30, 1990; Feder, Barnaby J., 'The Migrations of Behemoth's Soul and Software,' New York Times, August 16, 1992; Field, Anne R., 'Computer Associates Buys Its Way to the Top,' Business Week, June 15, 1987; Hafner, Katherine M., 'How Computer Associates Climbed to No. 1 in Software,' Business Week, July 11, 1988; Markoff, John, 'Ruling May Restrict Copyrights for Software,' New York Times, June 24, 1992; Miller, Michael W., 'Computer Associates Disarms Its Critics,' Wall Street Journal, April 28, 1989; Schwartz, Evan, 'Faulty Vision,' Business Week, July 30, 1990; Schwartz, Evan I., 'Computer Associates Gets User-Friendly,' Business Week, January 21, 1991; Slutsker, Gary, 'Charles Wang and His Thundering Nerds,' Forbes, July 11, 1988.

Related information about Computer

The modern electronic digital computer is the result of a long
series of developments, which started some 5000 years ago with the
abacus. The first mechanical adding device was developed in 1642 by
the French scientist-philosopher, Pascal. His ‘arithmetic machine’,
was followed by the ‘stepped reckoner’ invented by Leibnitz in
1671, which was capable of also doing multiplication, division, and
the evaluation of square roots by a series of stepped additions,
not unlike the methods used in modern digital computers. In 1835,
Charles Babbage formulated his concept of an ‘analytical machine’
which combined arithmetic processes with decisions based on the
results of the computations. This was really the forerunner of the
modern digital computer, in that it combined the principles of
sequential control, branching, looping, and storage units.

In the later 19th-c, George Boole developed the symbolic binary
logic which led to Boolean algebra and the binary switching
methodology used in modern computers. Herman Hollerith (1860–1929),
a US statistician, developed punched card techniques, mainly to aid
with the US census at the beginning of the 20th-c; this advanced
the concept of automatic processing, but major developments awaited
the availability of suitable electronic devices. J Presper Eckert
(1919–95) and John W Mauchly (1907–80) produced the first
all-electronic digital computer, ENIAC (Electronic Numerical
Integrator and Calculator), at the University of Pennsylvania in
1946, which was 1000 times faster than the mechanical computers.
Their development of ENIAC led to one of the first commercial
computers, UNIVAC I, in the early 1950s, which was able to handle
both numerical and alphabetical information. Very significant
contributions were made around this time by Johann von Neumann, who
converted the ENIAC principles to give the EDVAC computer
(Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer) which could
modify its own programs in much the same way as suggested by
Babbage.

The first stored program digital computer to run an actual
program was built at Manchester University, UK, and first performed
successfully in 1948. This computer was later developed into the
Ferranti Mark I computer, widely sold. The first digital computer
(EDSAC) to be able to be offered as a service to users was
developed at Cambridge University, UK, and ran in the spring of
1949. The EDSAC design was used as the basis of the first business
computer system, the Lyons Electronic Office. Advances followed
rapidly from the 1950s, and were further accelerated from the
mid-1960s by the successful development of miniaturization
techniques in the electronics industry. The first microprocessor,
which might be regarded as a computer on a chip, appeared in 1971,
and nowadays the power of even the most modest personal computer
can equal or outstrip the early electronic computers of the 1940s.
The key elements in computing today are miniaturization and
communications. Hand-held computers, with input via a stylus, can
be linked to central systems through a mobile telephone.

sprotected

A computer is a machine for manipulating data according to a list of instructions known as a program.

Computers are extremely versatile. According to the Church?Turing
thesis, a computer with a certain minimum threshold capability
is in principle capable of performing the tasks of any other
computer. Therefore, computers with capabilities ranging from those
of a personal digital assistant to a supercomputer may all
perform the same tasks, as long as time and memory capacity
are not considerations. Therefore, the same computer designs may be
adapted for tasks ranging from processing company payrolls to controlling unmanned
spaceflights. Due to technological advancement, modern electronic computers
are exponentially more capable than those of preceding generations
(a phenomenon partially described by Moore's Law).

Computers take numerous physical forms. Early electronic computers
were the size of a large room, while entire modern embedded
computers may be smaller than a deck of playing cards. Even today,
enormous computing facilities still exist for specialized scientific
computation and for the transaction
processing requirements of large organizations. Smaller
computers designed for individual use are called personal computers.
Along with its portable equivalent, the laptop computer, the
personal computer is the ubiquitous information processing and
communication
tool, and is usually what is meant by "a computer". However, the
most common form of computer in use today is the embedded computer.
They may control machines from fighter aircraft to industrial robots to
digital
cameras.

History of computing

Originally, the term "computer" referred to a person who performed
numerical calculations, often with the aid of a mechanical
calculating device or analog computer. Examples of these early devices, the
ancestors of the computer, included the abacus and the Antikythera
mechanism, an ancient Greek device for calculating the movements of
planets which dates from
about 87 BC. The end of the Middle Ages saw a reinvigoration of European mathematics
and engineering, and Wilhelm Schickard's 1623 device was the first of a
number of mechanical calculators constructed by European
engineers.

In 1801, Joseph Marie
Jacquard made an improvement to existing loom designs that used
a series of punched paper cards as a program to weave intricate
patterns. The resulting Jacquard loom is not considered a true computer but it
was an important step in the development of modern digital
computers.

Charles Babbage
was the first to conceptualize and design a fully programmable
computer as early as 1820, but due to a combination of the limits
of the technology of the time, limited finance, and an inability to
resist tinkering with his design, the device was never actually
constructed in his lifetime. By the end of the 19th century a
number of technologies that would later prove useful in computing
had appeared, such as the punch card and the vacuum tube, and large-scale automated data processing
using punch cards was performed by tabulating machines designed by
Hermann
Hollerith.

During the first half of the 20th century, many scientific
computing needs were met by increasingly sophisticated
special-purpose analog computers, which used a direct mechanical or
electrical model of
the problem as a basis for computation (they became increasingly
rare after the development of the programmable digital computer). A
succession of steadily more powerful and flexible computing devices
were constructed in the 1930s and 1940s, gradually adding the key
features of modern computers.

The use of digital electronics was introduced by Claude Shannon in
1937Shannon, Claude Elwood (1940). He came up with the idea while
studying the relay
circuits of Vannevar
Bush's Differential Analyzer.{scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/Shannon.html
Biography of Claude Elwood Shannon] - URL retrieved September 26, 2006 This point marked the
beginning of binary digital circuit design and the use of logic gates. Precursors of
this idea were Almon
Strowger, who patented a device containing a logic gate switch
circuit, Nikola
Tesla who filed for patents of devices containing logic gate
circuits in 1898 (see List of Tesla patents), and Lee De Forest's
modification, in 1907, who replaced relays with vacuum tubes.

Defining one point along this road as "the first digital electronic
computer" is exceedingly difficult.
On 12 May, 1941 Konrad Zuse completed his electromechanical
Z3, being the first working
machine featuring automatic binary arithmetic and feasible programmability
(therefore the first digital operational programmable computer,
although not electronic); other notable achievements include the
Atanasoff-Berry Computer (shown working around Summer
1941), a special-purpose machine that used valve-driven (vacuum
tube) computation, binary numbers, and regenerative memory; the Harvard Mark I, a
large-scale electromechanical computer with limited programmability
(shown working around 1944); which was the first general
purpose electronic computer, but originally had an inflexible
architecture that meant reprogramming it essentially required it to
be rewired.

The team who developed ENIAC, recognizing its flaws, came up with a
far more flexible and elegant design, which has become known as the
Von Neumann
architecture (or "stored program architecture"). The first to
be up and running was the Small-Scale
Experimental Machine, but the EDSAC was perhaps the first practical version that was
developed.

Valve (tube) driven computer designs were in use throughout the
1950s, but were eventually replaced with transistor-based computers,
which were smaller, faster, cheaper, and much more reliable, thus
allowing them to be commercially produced, in the 1960s. By the
1970s, the adoption of integrated circuit technology had enabled computers to
be produced at a low enough cost to allow individuals to own
personal
computers.

How computers work: the stored program architecture

Display

Motherboard

CPU (Microprocessor)

Primary
storage (RAM)

Expansion
cards

Power
supply

Optical disc
drive

Secondary
storage (HD)

Keyboard

Mouse

]]

While the technologies used in computers have changed dramatically
since the first electronic, general-purpose computers of the 1940s, most
still use the stored program architecture (sometimes called the von
Neumann architecture). rewrite -->
The architecture describes a computer with four main sections: the
arithmetic
and logic unit (ALU), the control circuitry, the memory, and the input
and output devices (collectively termed I/O). These parts are
interconnected by bundles of wires (called "buses" when the same bundle
supports more than one data path) and are usually driven by a timer
or clock (although
other events could drive the control circuitry).

Conceptually, a computer's memory can be viewed as a list of cells.
This information can
either be an instruction, telling the computer what to do, or data,
the information which the computer is to process using the
instructions that have been placed in the memory. In principle, any
cell can be used to store either instructions or data.

The ALU is in many senses
the heart of the computer. On a typical personal computer, input
devices include objects like the keyboard and mouse, and output devices
include computer
monitors, printers and the like, but as will be discussed later a
huge variety of devices can be connected to a computer and serve as
I/O devices.

The control system ties this all together. typically, this is
incremented each time an instruction is executed, unless the
instruction itself indicates that the next instruction should be at
some other location (allowing the computer to repeatedly execute
the same instructions).

Since the 1980s the ALU and control unit (collectively called a
central
processing unit or CPU) have typically been located on a single
integrated
circuit called a microprocessor.

The functioning of such a computer is in principle quite
straightforward.

Instructions, like data, are represented within the computer as
binary
code ? The particular instruction set that a specific computer
supports is known as that computer's machine language.

More powerful computers such as minicomputers, mainframe computers
and servers may differ from the model above by dividing
their work between more than one main CPU. Multiprocessor and
multicore personal and laptop computers are also
beginning to become available.

Supercomputers
often have highly unusual architectures significantly different
from the basic stored-program architecture, sometimes featuring
thousands of CPUs, but such designs tend to be useful only for
specialized tasks. At the other end of the size scale, some
microcontrollers
use the Harvard
architecture that ensures that program and data memory are
logically separate.

Digital circuits

The conceptual design above could be implemented using a variety
of different technologies. As previously mentioned, a stored
program computer could be designed entirely of mechanical
components like Babbage's devices or the Digi-Comp I. However, digital circuits allow
Boolean logic and
arithmetic using
binary numerals to be implemented using relays ? when electricity is provided to one of
the pins, current can flow through between the other two.

Through arrangements of logic gates, one can build digital circuits
to do more complex tasks, for instance, an adder, which
implements in electronics the same method ? in computer
terminology, an algorithm ? Therefore, by the 1960s they were replaced
by the transistor, a
new device which performed the same task as the tube but was much
smaller, faster operating, reliable, used much less power, and was
far cheaper.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the transistor itself was gradually
replaced by the integrated circuit, which placed multiple transistors
(and other components) and the wires connecting them on a single,
solid piece of silicon. By the 1970s, the entire ALU and control
unit, the combination becoming known as a CPU, were being
placed on a single "chip" called a microprocessor. as of 2006, the Intel Core Duo
processor contains 151 million transistors.

Tubes, transistors, and transistors on integrated circuits can be
used as the "storage" component of the stored-program architecture,
using a circuit design known as a flip-flop,
and indeed flip-flops are used for small amounts of very high-speed
storage. Instead, earliest computers stored data in Williams tubes ? These
results can either be viewed directly by a user, or they can be
sent to another machine, whose control has been assigned to the
computer: In a robot, for
instance, the controlling computer's major output device is the
robot itself.

The first generation of computers were equipped with a fairly
limited range of input devices. A punch card reader, or something similar, was used
to enter instructions and data into the computer's memory, and some
kind of printer, usually a modified teletype, was used to record the results. For the
personal computer, for instance, keyboards and mice are the primary ways
people directly enter information into the computer; and monitors are the
primary way in which information from the computer is presented
back to the user, though printers, speakers, and headphones are common, too. The first
class is that of secondary storage devices, such as hard disks, CD-ROMs, key drives and the like,
which represent comparatively slow, but high-capacity devices,
where information can be stored for later retrieval;

Programs

Computer
programs are simply lists of instructions for the computer to
execute. Rather, they do millions of simple instructions arranged
by people known as programmers.

In practice, people do not normally write the instructions for
computers directly in machine language. Instead, programmers
describe the desired actions in a "high level" programming
language which is then translated into the machine language
automatically by special computer programs (interpreters
and compilers). The
language chosen for a particular task depends on the nature of the
task, the skill set of the programmers, tool availability and,
often, the requirements of the customers (for instance, projects
for the US military were often required to be in the Ada programming
language).

Computer
software is an alternative term for computer programs; A
computer
application is a piece of computer software provided to many
computer users, often in a retail environment. The stereotypical
modern example of an application is perhaps the office suite, a set of
interrelated programs for performing common office tasks.

Going from the extremely simple capabilities of a single machine
language instruction to the myriad capabilities of application
programs means that many computer programs are extremely large and
complex. A typical example is Windows XP, created from roughly 40 million lines of computer
code in the C++
programming
language;Tanenbaum, Andrew S. the discipline of software
engineering has attempted, with some success, to make the
process quicker and more productive and improve the quality of the
end product.

A problem or a model is computational if it is formalized in
such way that can be transformed to the form of a computer program.
the classic example of this type of early operating system was
OS/360 by IBM.

The next major development in operating systems was timesharing ? Security
access controls, allowing computer users access only to files,
directories and programs they had permissions to use, were also
common.

Perhaps the last major addition to the operating system was tools
to provide programs with a standardized graphical user
interface. For instance, Apple's Mac OS X ships with a digital video
editor application.

Networking and the Internet

Computers have been used to coordinate information in multiple
locations since the 1950s, with the US military's SAGE
system the first large-scale example of such a system, which led to
a number of special-purpose commercial systems like Sabre.

In the 1970s, computer engineers at research institutions
throughout the US began to link their computers together using
telecommunications technology. This effort was funded by ARPA,
and the computer
network that it produced was called the ARPANET. In the phrase of
John Gage and Bill Joy (of Sun Microsystems), "the
network is the computer". Initially these facilities were available
primarily to people working in high-tech environments, but in the
1990s the spread of applications like e-mail and the World Wide Web, combined with the development of
cheap, fast networking technologies like Ethernet and ADSL saw computer networking become ubiquitous almost
everywhere. A very large proportion of personal computers
regularly connect to the Internet to communicate and receive information.
"Wireless" networking, often utilizing mobile phone networks, has
meant networking is becoming increasingly ubiquitous even in mobile
computing environments. Therefore, there has been research interest
in some computer models that use biological processes, or the
oddities of quantum
physics, to tackle these types of problems. However, such a
system is limited by the maximum practical mass of DNA that can be
handled.

Quantum
computers, as the name implies, take advantage of the unusual
world of quantum physics.

These alternative models for computation remain research projects
at the present time, and will likely find application only for
those problems where conventional computers are inadequate.

See also Unconventional computing. Terminology for different
professional disciplines is still somewhat fluid and new fields
emerge from time to time: however, some of the major groupings are
as follows:

Computer
engineering is the branch of electrical
engineering that focuses both on hardware and software
design, and the interaction between the two.

Computer
science is a traditional name of the academic study of the
processes related to computers and computation, such as
developing efficient algorithms to perform specific class of tasks. one of
many examples is experts in geographical
information systems who apply computer technology to problems
of managing geographical information.

There are three major professional societies dedicated to
computers, the British Computer Society the Association for Computing Machinery and IEEE Computer
Society.

Citing this material

Please include a link to this page if you have found this material useful for research or writing a related article. Content on this website is from high-quality, licensed material originally published in print form. You can always be sure you're reading unbiased, factual, and accurate information.

Highlight the text below, right-click, and select “copy”. Paste the link into your website, email, or any other HTML document.

User Comments

This web site and associated pages are not associated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Computer Associates International, Inc. and has no official or unofficial affiliation with Computer Associates International, Inc..